Running against the tide - the life of an investigative journalist

ELIZABETH JACKSON: If you're a rusted on ABC listener and viewer, the name Andrew Fowler will be very familiar to you.

Andrew is an extraordinary journalist who has spent much of his career with the ABC.

He's worked for just about all of the ABC's flagship programs, earning himself an excellent reputation as a highly skilled investigative journalist.

Now Andrew is retiring: our loss, his gain.

He spoke to Natasha Johnson about his career.

ANDREW FOWLER: I started in journalism because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to right the injustices that I saw.

So I took baby steps at the beginning. I started as a sports reporter on a very small newspaper called the Mid Sussex Times, where I covered everything from road safety committee meetings to the local town council- things like that.

And I what I learnt from that experience was that, unlike doing international stories where you can make mistakes and get things wrong and generally hide what you don't know by other people's ignorance, if you work in a small community, then you actually make eye contact with the people that you've reported about the previous week.

That makes life quite tough. It also made me understand in later life that, when I reported on somebody in the local community, I then didn't have to go back and confront those people, but the local people I had worked with did, so I was cautious in protecting those people from having to put up with the mistakes I might have made or people I might have upset wrongly in that community.

NATASHA JOHNSON: What have been the career highlights for you?

ANDREW FOWLER: In London, I worked in London on the London Evening News newspaper in Fleet Street, when Fleet Street was the centre of journalism. Every journalist would have killed their grandmother to get there.

And I reported on the IRA (Irish Republican Army) bombings of London, and it's quite a, it’s a sobering experience for a journalists to be, I realised, running against the tide - which is what journalists do if they're doing their job - and I was running down Oxford Street towards where a car bomb had gone off, and everybody else was running in the other direction. And I realised then that I would be forever running against the tide, and I think that's what journalism was.

I also realised that I was slightly crazy/brave at the time as well, and that was something I learnt maybe to be slightly more cautious in my approach to protect myself.

NATASHA JOHNSON: What about at the ABC? What have been your favourite stories?

ANDREW FOWLER: You know, the story that to me made a difference culturally to the people I was reporting on was a story of Merv Jenkins, and he was a defence liaison officer in Washington who took his own life and the reason that Jenkins took his own life was because the pressure that was put on him by Australian government departments - Defence and Foreign Affairs - because he had revealed information to the Americans about what the Indonesians were doing in Timor.

And Jenkins was a heroic person, much loved by his community, and a very brave person, but the pressure that was put on him was such that he found life intolerable and decided to commit suicide.

And what's important about his story were two things.

One, that the people inside the defence community understood, and they told me, that Jenkins was a really good person, and they said that story just made us realise that again, like journalists, you've got to have somebody else other than the institution to support you.

Jenkins put everything into the institution, and didn't share it with his family, so when the pressure got on him, he just had nowhere to turn.

I went down to Canberra with Peter Cronau, the producer on that particular story.

We went to see Jenkins' wife to talk her into talking to us, which helped to tell the story. And, the son of Merv Jenkins, Simon, was there and when we walked in, he said, "Hey Mum, we've got some friends here, somebody who will help us."

And I must say, of all the things that break your heart, that breaks your heart - a representative of Australia, his son thinks that Four Corners is going to be his friend to help repair some of the damage done to his father.

And I realised then that, when people talk to you as a journalist, they very often share their inner secrets with you and their inner fears and hopes, and I think as journalists we need to respect and protect that. Even though we are very brash and hard-nosed about exposing information that others want kept secret, I think we also should never lose our humanity.

It's those moments that stay with me.

The other stuff is really just about Timor, and what a terrible tragedy that was and how disreputable the government was in my opinion in how they handled that particular situation, and the terrible killings that took place and the government cover up and denial - particularly the denials by Alexander Downer about the involvement of the Indonesian military.

Quite clearly, we knew that the Indonesian military were hand in glove with the gangs that were murdering people, and what Jenkins did was to tell the Americans the truth about what was going on there.

And so that's why I think he was courageous, but that's why I think in the end he was alienated, because he stood out - he was an outsider in a very insider club.

NATASHA JOHNSON: What about Julian Assange? What has that story meant to you?

ANDREW FOWLER: Julian Assange is a kind of Rupert Murdoch figure. He's an outsider, and that's what I like about him. I think that as journalists, we're really all outsiders. If we're not outsiders, then we're insiders, and if we're insiders, we are very often captured by the people we're inside with.

It gives us more access to information but it's information that others want, and to quote Hugh Cudlipp, I think it was, famously of the Daily Mirror in London, he said, "News is what others want kept secret. All else is publicity."

So Assange, say like Murdoch, is an outsider and a change agent, and he came from Australia, as Murdoch did, and it's that ability to challenge authority and to see it as a given right to do that - which I think created those two people in that way, this is a culture that put them up on the world stage.

They're very different politically, I think, although of course in the past, Murdoch was very much a progressive social, liberal left as I put Assange into that sort of category, although he's also libertarian right in some areas - that kind of similarity.

Assange is a change agent. He's a very good journalist, and many journalists don't like me say that and don't like the argument that sees Assange as a journalist - they want to see him as something else - because I think what Assange did was to show how badly we had done our job, and how much we'd become part of the corporate state, and the corporate entities.

So, he stood against those powerful groups and showed us up for the failures that we were, in many ways. We didn't take chances. We were too willing to take the press release.

Very often, journalists are forced into that because of the speed of modern communications, and so you just have to keep feeding the beast.

On a program like Four Corners, we're very privileged and very lucky to have time to think. Journalists today don't have time to think, so there's a reason why journalists have become maybe more compliant. Large organisations, large governments, pay public relations people a lot of money to stop information getting out that they don't want out.

So those are all the reasons why journalism has failed, but what Assange did was he shone a bright light in everyone's face and said, “This is a failure. You didn't even ask hard questions about the Iraq War, Afghanistan. You've not held the government to account", and I think that' a good point. And that's a point where I think the epitaph of Assange is that he showed journalism up for the failings that it has.

NATASHA JOHNSON: It takes courage.

ANDREW FOWLER: Well, I think that people that have the courage are the people that trust us with their lives, with their futures, with their families' lives.

Back in the early days, back in 1990 when I first joined Lateline, in 1993 I was in Johannesburg and I was setting up some interviews for Kerry O'Brien for a program we were going to do on the elections coming up with Mandela running for presidency of the ANC (African National Congress), and I was taken to a place in the south of Johannesburg called Katlehong, and it was known then as the most dangerous place I the world.

But peace had broken out between the Inkatha Freedom Party, which is a Zulu group, and the ANC so everything was hunky dory.

So, I was driven down there in a Kombi by my mate John Carlin, who was working for The Independent then - he was doing a lot of work exposing the role of the South African security police in stirring up trouble between these two parties.

Anyway, all was quiet, all was peaceful. Carlin said, "sit in the front seat, it's a dream. No problem."

So I'd just got off the plane from Australia, so I was slightly jetlagged. Anyway, drive into Katlehong, we got out of the car and we were walking down the street with Carl Niehaus, who was in the ANC executive, and Cyril Ramaphosa who was the secretary-general of the ANC, and machine gun fire started.

And I just dropped to the ground. I saw the red earth, and it's funny you know, I just thought "it's just like Australia". And I wished I was back there at that very time.

The place scattered, everyone scattered, and Carlin called me over to a house where he was - he'd made his way to a house, which was a bombed out place - and he said "crawl through the barbed wire". I got through the barbed wire, got in there - Carlin's standing there, he's taking notes, and I said "where's the shooting coming from?"

"But, they could be in the grass over there. We're not sure where they're firing from."

I thought, "this is mighty fine, John. You told me it was going to be a bit of a picnic", you know?

We stayed there for about an hour and, as dark began to fall, the local ANC guys told us it really wasn't good to be the only two white men in Katlehong at that particular time, so they suggested that we made a bolt for it across the road.

So Carlin went first, and I went second, and the Christian Science Monitor followed me across the road.

We ran straight across the road.

And I was told that as we crossed the road, there was a line, like a zipper, of machine gun fire across the dirt, and we got in the other house.

Now, I suppose you could say it's always good to have a Christian Science Monitor behind you if you're running from gunfire.

Anyway, we got across the other side of the road, got in the house, and I heard a helicopter. I looked up, and it had 'Police' on the side of it, and being of English origin, I thought, "Ah, the police. They're coming to our rescue."

And at that very moment, the guy next to me who was carrying an AK-47 just started unloading on it - 'boom, boom, boom, boom, boom', like this.

And I said, "What are you doing?!", and he said, "The pigs, they're firing at us!"

I said, "No, no, you're firing at the pigs", and at this very moment, this thing banks and starts to come down towards us and I thought, "Well, this is all over now, you know. We're gone."

This thing just passed over us, and I made a run for it, got across to a car that was being driven around - Carling was driving this car around, this old French Renault round a big circle, and the doors were opening and shutting - it was like Bonnie and Clyde, it was ridiculous.

So I jumped in the car, and we drive off, got to the road, and I said, "Phew, John, that's great. That's all great. Let's get to the pub, let's get to Johannesburg."

He said, "No, we're on to the next place."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Well, the ANC's going to the next place. We're going on to the next village."

I said, "Is it anything like this peaceful place we've just been in?"

He said, "Oh yeah, it'll be fine. No worries."

So we ended up at a village, they held their meeting, and I was just leaning against this wall and I said "By the way, where are the Zulus? Where's the Inkatha Freedom Party, the guys that were firing at us before?"

He said, "What, the hostile?"

I said, "Yeah, where's the hostile?"

He said, "You're leaning against him,” and he said, “but it's fine here, it really is fine. It's all very calm now, there's been peace talks, it'll be calm."

But I thought to myself, "You know, as journalists, we go in and we go out, and the people that stay behind and live that life, those are the people that are quite heroic." They're on the front line. We can catch our business class flights home with a gin and tonic. They've got to stay there and put up with it.

A colleague of mine was reporting, while that shooting was going on - Jeremy Thompson from Sky News in London - and he was saying he used those exact words: he said "I'm here, the shooting's still going on" - and you can hear it in the background - "but we can leave today. They have to stay behind", and every journalist that travels and every journalist that tells other people's stories needs to remember that you leave and they remain.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: And that was Andrew Fowler speaking to Natasha Johnson.

Andrew, you have inspired us all. We wish you health and happiness and a terrific retirement.